London’s Chaos & Riots Continue: Looting, Fires, Violence in Response to Fatal Shooting of Alleged Gangster, Mark Duggan (video)
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on August 8, 2011
In north London, Mark Duggan's death has sparked fiery riots throughout Tottenham
Looting, vandalism, and violence continue in Tottenham in north London in response to last week’s fatal shooting of 29-year-old Mark Duggan, an alleged gangster — hundreds of people have been arrested.
The family of Duggan reportedly do not condone the escalating violence being attached to his name and have asked that the mindless violence stop.
Tottenham, London Riots coverage | BBC News | 7th August 2011
From CS Monitor, London riots strain police force. Have spending cuts played a role in unrest?:
A spate of London riots and looting, sparked by the fatal shooting of an alleged gangster, have posed a serious test of Britain’s policing capability just 12 months ahead of the 2012 Summer Olympics. It has also raised questions about the social impact of Prime Minister David Cameron’s five-year austerity plan to dramatically cut back government spending – a plan aimed at bolstering Britain’s economy amid a European economic crisis.
Parts of London cleared up today after some of the worst civil disturbances in the capital for more than 25 years, which began Thursday night after police shot dead a local man in racially mixed Tottenham. The impoverished inner-city area of north London was the scene of race riots in 1985 during which policeman Keith Blakelock was murdered by a mob.
Riots and looting, some of which police said was just plain criminality, spread to other London suburbs over the weekend. London police officials tripled the number of officers on the ground from Saturday to Sunday night, and Deputy Assistant Commissioner Stephen Kavanagh said there would be a third more officers on the ground this evening.
Russia Times: Fresh video of London riots: Crowd street rampage
From Financial Times, London rioting spreads beyond capital:
British prime minister David Cameron and other senior politicians were planning to fly back from holiday on Monday as riots spread through London with potent images of the capital ablaze beamed around the world and emboldened youths attacking in broad daylight.
Both Theresa May, home secretary, and Boris Johnson, London mayor returned to the UK to lead the political response to the violence, which started in Tottenham after a peaceful vigil for a local resident shot dead during a police operation. Mr Cameron, returning from Italy, will chair a meeting of the Cobra emergency committee on Tuesday.
In a sign that rioters were growing in confidence, between 50 and 100 youths gathered on a busy junction in Hackney, east London, not far from the site of next year’s Olympic games, during the early afternoon, throwing missiles at police and setting light to cars. Local shops pulled down their shutters and the shopping centre closed as owners feared a repeat of the looting suffered by retailers in Tottenham, Walthamstow and Brixton over the weekend.
To the south of the capital, disturbances flared in Peckham, Lewisham, Clapham Junction and Croydon where cars and buildings were set on fire. The Metropolitan Police confirmed that officers from five forces outside the capital had been deployed to help contain the aggression. London officials said as many as 1,400 police officers had been deployed round the city.
From Daily Mail:
His family and friends claim he was unarmed and have demanded ‘Justice for Mark’.
But the man whose violent death triggered the Tottenham riots at the weekend makes an unlikely martyr.
On the streets of the Broadwater Farm estate, where Mark Duggan grew up, he was also known by another name: ‘Starrish Mark’.
It sounds like an innocent nickname; it was anything but. In fact, the word ‘Starrish’ denoted his membership of a notorious ‘crew’ called The Star Gang who strut the streets of London’s N17.
The stock-in-trade of such ‘postcode’ gangs is violence, intimidation and, more often than not, drugs.
Duggan himself, according to some residents, was a crack cocaine dealer who routinely carried a gun.
From The Guardian, London riots: how did the Metropolitan police lose control of the capital?:
The Metropolitan police’s embattled public order unit, CO11, once prided itself on being the world leader in containing disorder. At 3am yesterday, its exhausted officers slept in police vans lined up in Enfield town centre, bruised, exhausted and, for the second night running, entirely out-manoeuvred.
For hours they had been chasing groups of youths around Enfield, Ponders End and Edmonton, in north London, using dogs and batons to disperse anyone seen looting shops.
Any doubt that police were unable to control the violence was dispelled hours later, around 5pm yesterday, amid further outbreaks of looting in Hackney and other areas of the capital in broad daylight.
The home secretary, Theresa May, who flew home from holiday to deal with the fallout from the riots, will have asked commanders of the UK’s largest police force: how did you lose control of London?
For the third day running, CO11′s territorial support group (TSG), nicknamed the “Muscle of the Met”, suffered the humiliation of requiring support from colleagues in neighbouring forces.
Some will rightly claim police cannot hope to contend with hundreds of roaming youths intent on causing destruction and breaking into unprotected properties in the middle of the night.
That challenge has been exacerbated since disturbances started on Saturday, initially limited to one street in Tottenham and, later in the night, Wood Green.
The contagion that saw looting spread across a 10-mile stretch of London in the early hours of Monday poses obvious resource issues. Analysts argued the Met suffered from a combination of bad luck, poor intelligence and overstretched forces. But there may be more long-standing and tactical reasons for its failure to quell the violence.
In Tottenham on Saturday police were accused of failing to open dialogue with protesters who had gathered outside the police station following the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan.
“Years ago there would have been a lot of dialogue,” said David Gilbertson, formerly a Metropolitan police division chief superintendent at Tottenham. “We would have gone out of our way to ensure that the organisers of a protest group would have been brought into a station like that even if others were stood outside.”
It took hours for police to change from regular uniforms to riot gear, and even longer for them to begin almost half-hearted attempts at preventing looting.
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